Ear Notch Lair

By Pete Racek
Wolfhill Entertainment
1e
Level ?

Pffft, they’re just Goblins. What are all of you so Scared?

This fifteen page adventures features a twenty room cave dungeon full of goblins. And is shit, representing all that is wrong with the world.

I heard that Ear Notch Lair killed a man in Arkansas. And, also, that it burned down a house in Reno. And jaywalked in Burbank. And took the sucker from a babies mouth in Altair. Also, I heard it plays 4e.

Making humanoids great agin, right?1 Right on man! I mean, ignoring the divisive slogan,I can get behind some Yrchyn The Tyrant style lair! Let’s get some kobold action going baby! And not that Tuckers shit, but some hard nose fuckers with some iron pipes comeing for you!

Oh, wait. That’s not this adventure. This adventure has the party stating captured, only in rags. So, it’s making goblins scary again by taking away everyone’s spells and equipment and dressing you only in rags (why do that? Why not go full on FATAL?) So, you know, the designer didn’t even try at all.

It’s a jail break. You’ve been captured, off screen presumably, and now are manacled up in a cell. Make a HARD Muscle check to break loose! Ok, so, you know when it says “1st Edition” in what this is written for? Yeah, no, not so much. Life Points, Armour equivalent to Splint mail, a to hit equal to the most proficient person in the party … this is generic garbage that is actually 1e but too fucking afraid to put in some stats. Did I mention that one of the first sentences in the product is “There is No open game content in this product and no portion may be reproduced for any reason?” Hey, man, I just reproduced your Do Not Reproduce statement. Better sue the fuck out of me. Or, you could stop being a FUCKING IDIOT and take that shit out and just concentrate on actually writing an adventure using 1e stats. You know, what everyone else is doing? I know, I know, you’d have to actually concentrate on the adventure then and that’s _hard_. You put the fucking effort in to the fucking adventure. You put it in to making it good. You agonizing over the writing and the fucking encounters. You don’t put the fucking effort in to coming up with a synonym for Hit Points over fear of a fucking lawsuit. The main fucking thing is the main fucking thing. 

Ok, back to the adventure. I missed my HARD muscle check. So did everyone else. I guess our adventure is now over since we can’t escape? You don’t put the fucking adventure behind a gate. You don’t make the evenings play depend on a single roll. Jesus, it’s like the last ten years of adventure analysis doesn’t fucking exist at all. 

Oh, hey, hey … remember you start in just rags? You can use the goblins weapons, right?!!!! Except they all break on a 1 in 10 every time you use them. But, of course, that doesn’t happen to the goblins when THEY use them. Cause, you know, the designer is a cool dude. We don’t do adversarial play. 

Oh, lets see … the map. Pretty decent. Caves. Some larger caverns. Asream flowing through it and some water. Some flowstone steps. Some tunnels. I’m digging on it. There’s a color coded one that makes no sense ta all, and simple things lie the guard patrols are not shown on the map at all, but, hey, a designer can’t be expected to do their jobs, right? Why make it easy on the DM? It will, no doubt, build their fortitude, to just write a description of the patrol  instead of putting it on the map. 

Oh! Oh! The chief has 360gp! That’s your fucking treasure! ENjoy your 1e Gold=XP life experience you fucking morons! Hahahahahaha! And you thought you were playing D&D! Welcome to the hellish world of the DM/Designers creation where they toy with you for no reward! This is what people think D&D is. It’s sad.

Rooms have, like, a one sentence description in normal text and then a fuck ton of bolded text that is DM text. I most often mention italics, and long sections of it being hard to read, but that goes for any fancy font treatment. Short bolded words to call attention. A sentence. Maybe two. Not paragraphs. It makes it unreadable. 

There’s nothing here. Room notes on how to sneak past goblins, that take up a huge amount of text, per room. DM notes out the wazoo rather than shit going on for the DM to leverage. Meaning, advice to the DM on how to run the room rather than setting up a situation for the DM to run. 

It’s all just so depressing. A fifteen pages for twenty rooms. And the chiefs quarters near the entrance/exit, since that’s the goal, instead of deep inside, as it normally is. 

This is just another low effort entry to the long line of low effort entires that make up the D&D adventure market.

This is $1.50 at DriveThru. There’s no preview. Sir Hiss says “Suuuckkkkerrrrrr!”

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/417728/Ear-Notch-Lair?1892600